Coming out is no simple matter, this Axel knows for certain. He has to live with the shame society lashes him with like a whip, telling him that he is inferior to heterosexual people, not allowing him to marry his boyfriend of two years, turning him away from churches because he loves another man and making him uncomfortable in locker rooms. Some straight men, so full of themselves, honestly believe that Axel is checking them out, imagining them in strange sexual positions, when in reality, he doesn't care. There's only one man for him, and he's got him.
And it's not fair, he thinks, that if anything has any hint of homosexuality in it, anything at all, it is judged as inferior, less than acceptable. He wonders if a movie he watched several days ago had had a straight couple rather than a lesbian one, would people have loved it? Mostly likely, yes. Gay novels are so hard to come by because no one wants to read a book about two gay people. And what if there is gay sex in there? they probably wonder, which frustrates Axel further.
He hates it, hates it more than his old landlord who made his life hell for not fixing anything broken in his old apartment. His life is just like that, he thinks; there are so many things wrong, so many laws and rules that need to be changed so he can have the rights he deserves as a human being. No one wants to fix any of it except for the few who also believe there are many things wrong. The other gay men and lesbians, the bisexual men and women, the transgender, and everyone else in the ever-growing LGBTQ list all know that things must change.
How he hates it when the heterosexual men and women, who think they know everything there is to know, tell him that the gays and the bisexuals and the rest of them are the wrong ones. Axel sits in church and listens to the men and women there repeat over and over that being gay is a sin, that loving someone else for who they are is against God's law. He listens to men from Texas say that gay men are immoral, they're rapists and they convert other men by raping them. He listens to all of these words coming at him from all sides, and he's not surprised when younger generations carry on the same ignorance and bigotry. How can they change when homophobia is screamed at them from all sides?
Axel walks into his apartment and shuts the door. It's late, around seven, and he didn't expect to return so late. His boyfriend, who always worries when he's not home at a similar time every day without a phone call, nearly falls as he scrambles to get off the couch. He welcomes the tired man with open arms, arms that Axel is glad to have around him. It's nice to come home to someone who understands what he's going through. They've talked about weddings and adopting children (his boyfriend adores kids, being a mentor for inner-city children), but they know they'll have to wait a while. It may not come at all in their lifetime. But Axel knows that by the time they're sixty, seventy or eighty years old, they'll be able to remember a time when they were treated as second-class citizens and not as equals.
While his boyfriend snores in his lap, tired from basketball, hopscotch and jumping rope with little girls, Axel watches the news cover a story about a boy standing up for another boy, gay and a complete stranger, against several bullies at his middle school. He can't help but smile and think, 'Times are changing.'